Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO: The “New” Labor History Meets the “Wages of Whiteness”

Economic Democracy against Racial Capitalism: Seeding Freedom

“…Indeed, the BSCP played a part in this struggle, too, helping to inaugurate a period from the 1930s to the 1950s during which the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) successfully organized multiracial worker populations in factories around the country. 49 In the postwar decades, some unions were also able to make headway in areas of the service economy where work performed disproportionately by people of color and women had been systematically devalued. The National Health Care Workers' Union, or 1199 (now 1199SEIU), which Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as his favorite union, pioneered the unionization of pharmacy and frontline hospital workers, using sit-down strikes and other civil rights-era tactics to command attention.…”

Anti-Racism, Black Workers, and Southern Labor Organizing: Historical Notes on a Continuing Struggle

“…Many CIO organizers in the South understandably tried to sidestep racial issues during the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when merely getting blacks and whites into the same room was enough to provoke a white riot or police repression. CIO organizers often tried to avoid speaking about the issue of race or doing anything about it either (Interview with Forrest Dickinson, 1983)..And in the end, many CIO contracts codified discriminatory wage rates and seniority lines, and failed to challenge segregation at the work place or in the union hall (Honey, 1993(Honey, , 1999Norrell, 1986;Nelson, 1996Nelson, , 2000.…”

“…Following the lead of W.E.B. DuBois (DuBois, 1932), recent scholars have dug more deeply into the psychology of &dquo;whiteness&dquo; to show the many ways in which white workers incorporated racism into their world view and used it as a means to advance themselves (Roediger, 1991(Roediger, , 1994Nelson, 1996). White workers have always been part of the disfranchisement, race riots, police repression, and exclusion from unions and better jobs, housing, and education that have kept black people from advancing socially and economically.…”

Cities with Class?

“…The fight for unrestricted political access in the downtown arena was itself restricted, with claims to full access impeded for segments of the postwar working class. On the limits of racial egalitarianism in the CIO nationally, see Zieger 1995;Nelson 1996;Faue 1996;and Sugrue 1996b. 37 In a review of the social science literature on growth regimes, Logan, Whaley, and Crowder (1997: 605) argue ''that the principal effect of growth machines is to bend the policy priorities of localities toward developmental, rather than redistributional, goals.…”